1. Technical Field
This invention relates to a method and system having an adaptive encoding arrangement for coding a speech signal.
2. Related Art
Speech encoding may be used to increase the traffic handling capacity of an air interface of a wireless system. A wireless service provider generally seeks to maximize the number of active subscribers served by the wireless communications service for an allocated bandwidth of electromagnetic spectrum to maximize subscriber revenue. A wireless service provider may pay tariffs, licensing fees, and auction fees to governmental regulators to acquire or maintain the right to use an allocated bandwidth of frequencies for the provision of wireless communications services. Thus, the wireless service provider may select speech encoding technology to get the most return on its investment in wireless infrastructure.
Certain speech encoding schemes store a detailed database at an encoding site and a duplicate detailed database at a decoding site. Encoding infrastructure transmits reference data for indexing the duplicate detailed database to conserve the available bandwidth of the air interface. Instead of modulating a carrier signal with the entire speech signal at the encoding site, the encoding infrastructure merely transmits the shorter reference data that represents the original speech signal. The decoding infrastructure reconstructs a replica or representation of the original speech signal by using the shorter reference data to access the duplicate detailed database at the decoding site.
The quality of the speech signal may be impacted if an insufficient variety of excitation vectors are present in the detailed database to accurately represent the speech underlying the original speech signal. The maximum number of code identifiers (e. g., binary combinations) supported is one limitation on the variety of excitation vectors that may be represented in the detailed database (e. g., codebook). A limited number of possible excitation vectors for certain components of the speech signal, such as short-term predictive components, may not afford the accurate or intelligible representation of the speech signal by the excitation vectors. Accordingly, at times the reproduced speech may be artificial-sounding, distorted, unintelligible, or not perceptually palatable to subscribers. Thus, a need exists for enhancing the quality of reproduced speech, while adhering to the bandwidth constraints imposed by the transmission of reference or indexing information within a limited number of bits.